Teenage Pregnancy

At South Gate High, teen-agers are lining up to have babies. Students in a teen-age pregnancy prevention program--the only one of its kind in Los Angeles County--spend several days lugging around frighteningly lifelike baby dolls that wail at unpredictable intervals. The $220, computer-controlled "baby" with a recording of a newborn's cries cannot be quieted unless properly cuddled and "fed" by inserting a key into its monitoring device.

On Mother's Day, my daughter and her friend Jenny sat on our sofa rocking their baby dolls. It would have been an ordinary, sweet scene of children playing house, if Aviva and Jenny weren't teenagers. Our affluent school district has a thing for gadgets. In some classes, students have instant-answer transmitters, paid for by the schools' fundraising foundation, that enable the teacher to find out instantly whether students understand the lesson. Less successful — and I'm being generous here — was the software that supposedly taught good writing.

Nearly every television season, a storybook stork delivers a plot twist in the form of a baby to a teen drama. "The Secret Life of the American Teenager," created by Brenda Hampton of "7th Heaven," premiered last summer on ABC Family and introduced us to 15-year-old Amy Juergens, a scrawny, French horn-playing freshman at Grant High School who discovers she's pregnant -- though she's not even sure she actually had sex -- after a rendezvous with bad boy Ricky Underwood at band camp.

New information out just now explaining why Caroline Kennedy isn't Sen. Caroline Kennedy. Ticket readers will recall that back in January, when Hillary Rodham Clinton's New York Senate seat became vacant with her becoming secretary of State, the daughter of assassinated President John F. Kennedy expressed an interest in receiving the seat appointment from the state's governor, David Paterson. This would have continued a historical family position in the Senate. Caroline's father held a seat from Massachusetts, as does her terminally ailing uncle, Edward now. Another uncle, Robert, once held a New York Senate seat after serving as his brother's attorney general.

In an effort to reduce California's 70,000 births to teenage mothers every year, the state Health and Welfare Agency on Wednesday unveiled a $3-million advertising campaign to deter young men from having sex with adolescent girls. Separate Spanish- and English-language ads will target men aged 18 to 24, warning that statutory rape is a serious crime. The ads also encourage young men to take responsibility for the children they have already fathered.

As the bell rang for the next class, 19-year-old Yolanda Valdez put her baby in his crib, kissed his forehead, grabbed her books and rushed for the door. "I got to go. . . . I got to go to my P.E. class," she muttered to herself. Soon she was lost among the students hurrying from one class to another, just another teen-ager trying to get through the school day. That she is back in school seven weeks after giving birth surprises her; that she can take Michael along is "amazing," she said.

For 17-year-old David Mendez the price of admission to a computer training course included lessons in a male's responsibility in preventing teenage pregnancy. "It makes you think about how all your plans would change if you weren't careful," Mendez said of Project Amiga's Male Responsibility for Pregnancy Prevention Program. "You have to decide if being a parent so young is the life you want, or whether you want to be better prepared in life first."

Several community-based men's groups will offer informal counseling today at a Crenshaw district rally aimed at reducing teenage pregnancy. Volunteers from MAD DADS, an organization combating drugs and violence, and Big Brothers of Greater Los Angeles will staff booths, provide information and offer counseling at the Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw Plaza shopping center.

As part of a program to prevent teenage pregnancy, a nonprofit community organization and the Lennox School District on Friday opened the doors of the Lennox Teen Pregnancy Prevention Center. The district and the Richstone Family Center created the center for a pregnancy prevention program that has been operating in the district for more than a year. The site is at Lennox Middle School and will serve about 2,000 students.

The pregnancy rate among girls ages 15 to 19 rose 8.2% between 1974 and 1980, federal health officials reported, although the number of births to mothers in that age group fell 7.3% in that period. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, in a report titled "Teen-age Pregnancy and Fertility in the United States," said the higher pregnancy rate "probably reflects the increase in the percentage of never-married 15-to-19-year-olds with premarital sexual experience" and cautioned that the U.S.

The rate at which teenage girls in the United States are having babies has risen for a second year in a row, government statistics show, putting one of the nation's most successful social and public health campaigns in jeopardy. Nationally, the birth rate among 15- to 19-year-olds rose 1.4% from 2006 to 2007, continuing a climb that began a year earlier. The rate jumped 3.4% in 2006, reversing what had been a 14-year decline. The reasons for the increase remain unclear, although experts speculated that it could be due to growing complacency about AIDS and teen pregnancy, among other factors.

Nearly every television season, a storybook stork delivers a plot twist in the form of a baby to a teen drama. "The Secret Life of the American Teenager," created by Brenda Hampton of "7th Heaven," premiered last summer on ABC Family and introduced us to 15-year-old Amy Juergens, a scrawny, French horn-playing freshman at Grant High School who discovers she's pregnant -- though she's not even sure she actually had sex -- after a rendezvous with bad boy Ricky Underwood at band camp.

The mayor of Gloucester denied a Time magazine report that a group of girls entered a pact to become pregnant. "Any planned blood-oath bond to become pregnant, there is absolutely no evidence of," Carolyn Kirk said after meeting with school and health officials. At least 17 high school girls are expecting babies in the seaport 30 miles north of Boston. The 1,200-student high school has four times as many teenage girls expecting babies as it did last year. Kirk attributed the sharp rise in pregnancies to a lack of health education funding and the media's "glamorization of pregnancy."

This much, at least, is certain: Jamie Lynn Spears, the 16-year-old star of the Nickelodeon series "Zoey 101," is pregnant. (Or the British tabloid OK!, which paid a reported $1 million to announce the fact, will be wanting its money back.) As to just when and with whom, rumors keep arising to buffet what were yesterday asserted as facts. It is a fluid story whose meaning keeps changing as new grist is poured into the gossips' mill.

After 14 years of steady decline, the rate of teen births rose 3% last year, according to a federal study released Wednesday. Health officials were uncertain why the number was increasing and whether it represented the beginning of a trend. But Mary-Jane Wagle, president of Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, said she believed the increase was due to the failure of abstinence-only education programs, which can make teens less aware of contraceptive options.

At least once a day, a teenage girl walks into North High School's health clinic, wanting to find out whether she's pregnant. Frequently, it turns out she is. The city's teen birth rate is more than double the statewide rate of 24.3 births per 1,000 girls age 15 to 17, and Denver school officials are considering a proposal to dispense contraceptives in its six high-school-based health clinics, which serve the district's most impoverished students.

At 15, Jessica Cosby has an arm that may send her to college and beyond--to the Olympics, she hopes. The Granada Hills 10th-grader is Los Angeles' most accomplished female shotputter, a solid sprinter and a renowned rebounder who has twice made the all-city girls' basketball team. If Cosby is going to be a statistic, she wants to appear in the box scores on the sports page, not in an update on teen pregnancy.

Tina Jacobson has a close relationship with her teenage daughter. Shireen Miles and her daughter are close too. Jacobson believes her teen, Karissa, would come to her for help if she became pregnant. Same goes for Miles. But that's where the common ground ends for these two California mothers, who stand on opposing sides of what may be the most emotional -- and littlenoticed -- measure on the state's Nov. 8 special election ballot.

Citing Santa Ana's high teenage pregnancy rate, some parents and others in Orange County's largest school district are questioning a proposed health curriculum that pushes abstinence and barely mentions birth control. The Santa Ana Unified School District Board of Trustees will meet tonight to consider adopting a health textbook that doesn't include information on contraception.